


Two Kingdoms

by rynling



Category: Super Mario & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 05:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2457134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rynling/pseuds/rynling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prelude to Bowser's first kidnapping of Peach in which a shrewd princess and a powerful wizard are drawn to each other despite the danger their attraction poses to the stability of their respective kingdoms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Peach

Peach stood on the balcony overlooking the nave of the cathedral as she gazed down onto the wedding of her minister's daughter. She held her back straight, and her hands were neatly folded in front of her. She focused every ounce of her will on radiating an air of grace. It was a game she played with herself, imagining that the events unfolding before her could only occur because of her unflagging concentration. 

This may not have been literally true, but it was not entirely a product of her fantasy. The peace of the Mushroom Kingdom was woven with a gossamer spun from ceremonies, and Peach knew that she must lend the impression that her presence was indispensable. While the courtiers and bureaucrats played political games in the form of banquets and tournaments, she must serve as the still center around which everything revolved. 

The bride and groom kissed, and the organist launched into the traditional wedding recessional. The music swelling through the vaulted stone arches was Peach's cue to stand and clap. White confetti was tossed from hanging balconies, and the strips of paper took on the colors of the tinted light streaming through the tall stained glass windows, forming a rainbow as they fell. Small pink flowers were tossed along with the confetti, and they continued to float lazily downward even after the paper had fallen. The cathedral was a splendid sight, with broad-leafed heartvines delicately circling marble pillars carved with images of past heroes. The crowd below was richly dressed and perfumed with ambition. 

Although Peach's kingdom may have appeared peaceful to an outsider, it had not always been so. Her mother, the reigning queen, had been, in a word, despotic. Having neatly done away with Peach's father, she turned her attention to the elimination of political factions, making no attempt to deny her use of assassins both ostentatiously brutal and insidiously subtle. The queen's favorite method of disposal had been to promote outspoken ministers to posts in the provinces. After ensuring that the official's family had been uprooted, she would arrange for the travel party to meet with an accident on the road. Any survivors wishing to avenge the fallen were dealt with swiftly and savagely. 

There had been rebellion, but it was muted and weak. The queen clenched the economy within a ruthless fist, allowing her people just enough sustenance to prolong their lives. With the taxes she imposed she built grand monuments, employing the disenfranchised while keeping their stomachs full and their hands busy. She gave her kingdom just so much and no more, thus ensuring the complacency of its people. 

Peach could not be certain who her father may have been, or even if he had been entirely willing; men of all races buzzed about her mother like mayflies. Rumors eventually reached her ears that she was not the queen's only child, and that more than one princeling had died a blue death at her cruel hands. Regardless, the birth of a princess had become the justification for a celebration on an unprecedented scale, which was intended to exhaust the resources of the principalities and lull the populace into a soporific acceptance of the privileges of royal lineage. 

Peach later understood that, although these merriments seemed to be a brilliant strategy on the part of the queen, they were, in a way, the beginning of the last chapter of her reign. After being given a taste of the true riches of the kingdom, it was only natural that its people would strain within their bondage. 

Peach did not kill her mother; she did not need to. 

Her girlhood was a tapestry she wove around herself. She understood that she had to be attractive and charming at all times. Her smiles and laughter were her weapons. She welcomed the political dissidents who returned from exile, praying that their gratitude would outweigh any lingering bitterness. As Peach grew older she learned which advisors to trust, as well as which sycophants to brush off with empty pleasantries. Her sole aim was to prevent her kingdom from collapsing into anarchy, and she had to remain alive by whatever means necessary. So as not to invoke the memory of the dreaded queen, Peach chose to remain a princess. 

She sometimes wondered if she had sacrificed her life for that of her kingdom. The strings of a multitude of lives were twisted around her fingers, and the smallest movement of her hand could have unintended yet dire consequences. She lived in a high place, and it was very cold.

Peach was able to glide smoothly across the ice of her reign until the sovereign of the neighboring kingdom suddenly appeared in disguise within the walls of her capital city. As soon as she heard whispers of a man with horns, she had him apprehended and brought directly to her in secret. She saw herself reflected in his hard eyes and thin smile, and with his blithe impertinence she was finally able to measure the true fear with which her own people regarded her. The Koopa sorcerer promptly proved the chauvinistic reports of his people's brutishness to be false, and he evaded her inquiries with a skill betraying vast experience. She ultimately elected to guarantee his discretion with her own. 

Peach understood better than anyone how the slightest shift in the political balance between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Koopa Kingdom could result in catastrophe, and the strange foreign king who hid his true shape in order to visit her was never far from her mind. Although she questioned his methods, she couldn't help but wonder if he held the promise of an easier diplomatic compromise within his claws. 

He was fascinating to her. 

Peach smiled, waved, and laughed at the inane patter of the people who lingered on after the wedding, even as she reflected that their grandiloquent posturing spoke volumes of their ignorance. A horrific revolution was averted not even a decade in the past. Were their memories truly so short? Or had she sharpened herself to the point where she could not observe social interaction without attempting to dissect it? She knew that she would never be as terrifying as her mother, but she could feel herself attenuating into the late queen's frozen shadow. 

As Peach made her way down from the balcony, her mind worried over the interloper king. Was he an unsolved problem, or the beginning of a solution? She found herself drawn to him, but she could not meet him openly. The peace between their kingdoms was based on distance, and his repeated visits to her city were a variable that prevented the equation of her rule from balancing, yet she could not bring herself to order him to remain within his own territory. 

Bowser had been so present in her thoughts that she almost wasn't surprised to see him lurking in the shadow of an alcove. As the guests dispersed, she made excuses to linger in the cathedral. Once she was finally alone, she felt a weight lift from her shoulders; for once she didn't have to be the center of attention. As Peach slipped into the silence to draw close to the man waiting for her, she made a decision that she did not fully understand. It was not a question of right or wrong, but a matter of freedom and desire. Her kingdom fell away from her as she kissed him.


	2. Bowser

In the borderlands between the Koopa Kingdom and the Mushroom Kingdom, a strange phenomenon occasionally occurs: a mixture of hot winds blowing across desert sands and cool winds blowing through verdant forests results in clouds so solid that they can be ridden across the sky. 

For Bowser, kissing Peach was like falling into those clouds; it was ever so soft. 

Even for a wizard with his level of skill, walking as a man required constant attention, and it was not a transformation to be taken lightly. He tempted fate every time he was close to the princess, but he was unable to stay away. The smell of her skin and the play of light on her hair tugged at the edges of his consciousness and threatened to break his concentration. His desire was like a fire within his blood, yet it was obscenely gentle. It was difficult to be human around her. 

He knew he should stay in his kingdom, just as she should stay in hers. Their borders were maintained by tariffs and quotas and corollaries set into clauses of trade agreements. He once found the interplay between law and diplomacy fascinating, but now it frustrated him beyond measure. When the very fabric of reality could offer no resistance to his people's technology and his own magic, why should his life be so strongly shaped by etiolated words? What was the use of power, he reasoned, if not shaping the world according to his own wishes?

Bowser understood just how high the stakes were of what had arisen between him and the foreign princess. From his lands, her people took the energy she needed to fuel their civilization. From her lands, his people took the very essence of life. Her kingdom was rich with the green of the soil; his kingdom was wealthy with the treasures of the earth. Just as his people could not tolerate the chill rains of her kingdom, her people would not last long in the heat of the Koopa mines and foundries. History had taught him that the relationship between their kingdoms must forever be unequal on both sides, and that the consequences of war would be catastrophic.

Wildfires of political agitation were occasionally sparked among the Koopa principalities. He allowed them to burn before brutally extinguishing their sources. He sometimes fantasized about abdicating and thus removing himself from the crush of this responsibility, but the Koopa royal family's heritage of assassinations and invasions was too strong, stronger than even their claws or their shells or their many castles. Bowser craved freedom, yet he feared chaos, and he knew it was his duty to maintain order. 

His father had been a benevolent king, noble and just and kind. Under his rule many savage practices were eliminated; Koopa broods were no longer culled, and the skeletons of their dead were no longer reanimated. The late king established courts and a parliament, a canny delegation of power which in turn supported his own right to rule. In his day trade flourished and invention reached unprecedented heights. Prosperity led to greed, greed sparked flares of dissent, and dissent culminated in a civil war that ended only with the old king's death. 

The Koopa are a long-lived people, and Bowser sometimes wondered if they might be immortal were they not so intent on destroying each other. Their bodies were built to withstand great violence, but also to enact it. Were their scales and fangs created by the harshness of their environment, or by the conflict they visited on themselves? 

Bowser ascended the throne as a mere hatchling. He was not prepared, nor was he fit. His kingdom was no place for a child whose horns had not yet sharpened, and he was cast into court intrigue like a paper boat onto lava. He distrusted the council that had dethroned the late king, and he undermined them at every turn, knowing that he would perish if he were as generous as his father. 

The Koopa thrived on the disorder inherent in a constant cycle of destruction and renewal, and he allowed his kingdom to run away from him for brief periods before tightly reeling it back. By virtue of his heritage, Bowser was the largest and strongest of them, and it was not necessary to employ sophistication. He found that superfluous civil military campaigns worked wonders to eliminate his rivals and rally his people under his banner, and soon no one remained who dared to oppose him. He cultivated his persona as a warlord as painstakingly as his father cultivated channels of protocol, and if he was not respected then he was certainly feared.

This constant expenditure of energy was exhausting, and Bowser instinctively understood that his people must be allowed a periodic surcease of tyranny so that they did not become inured. It was for these reasons that he began to visit the Mushroom Kingdom in disguise. 

When he was human, it was as if the world became smaller and brighter. He could see fewer colors, but the spectrum he was able to perceive was ever so much deeper. He could no longer sense magnetic fields, but the humidity of the air was constantly present on his skin. His range of smell was severely limited, but everything that touched his tongue exploded with flavor. He became almost pathologically sensitive to changes in temperature, but the finest texture of every surface stood out in intense relief under the fleshy pads of his fingertips. His human form was fragile but he savored the experiences it afforded him. 

The Mushroom Kingdom is home to myriad peoples from other lands, but Peach knew Bowser for who I was almost as soon as he set foot into her realm. He was quietly passed between hands until he was eventually ushered into the inner sanctum of her castle. He allowed myself to be swept along, knowing exactly where he was being led, yet he was still not prepared for his first meeting with her. He had exchanged letters with her in the past, but secondhand messages could not convey the full force of her personality. Underneath her iron gaze he was completely vulnerable, stripped physically and mentally of my scales. He lashed out at her, substituting acid words for force, but she returned his every volley, stroke for stroke. He had never fought in this manner before, and it was infinitely amusing to him. 

And so Bowser returned, and he returned again. Although the passing of the seasons was much more noticeable in her kingdom than it was in his own, the time he spent there seemed to move slower, like honey pooling within a spoon. He had no doubt that cabals within his castles knew of his movements, but he did not care, for he learned much during his travels. The intelligence he acquired was precious to him, but it was not his sole purpose in visiting the Mushroom Kingdom. 

The princess's façade was cool and smooth, a cloudy amber through which he could not see clearly. Her thoughts and intentions were hidden from him, and he wanted to savage her, as if from her red wetness he might pry a core of ungilded truth. With nothing he did or said was he able to penetrate her. Her eyes and smile were as mysterious to him as a foreign language, yet his body responded as his mind could not. The gentle heat generated by the touch of her skin scorched away the errant thoughts in his mind, and the knowledge that he could destroy her if he lost control over himself was brushed away by the feather-light movement of her hands. 

She was intoxicating to him. 

As she kissed him, his heart quickened. Her breath became rougher, as did his own. She withdrew her lips from his, and he could see that her face was flushed. The sight of her was unbearably arousing, but he was able to return to himself long enough to shore up the spell that allowed him to remain a man. The mental calculations cooled his head, and he began to grow concerned over the consequences spinning rapidly outward from this moment of connection. He gathered himself to speak, or to kiss her again, but then she said something that completely unmoored him. 

"I want you to kidnap me."


End file.
